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A Public Calling: Lessons From The Lives Of Judges Of Color In Pennsylvania, Phoebe A. Haddon Nov 2011

A Public Calling: Lessons From The Lives Of Judges Of Color In Pennsylvania, Phoebe A. Haddon

Phoebe A. Haddon

This paper discusses how Judge Clifford Scott Green, Judge William Marutani, and Judge Juanita Kidd Stout spent their lives as leaders in the law to illustrate the ideal of a "public calling."


Consensual Amorous Relationships Between Faculty And Students: The Constitutional Right To Privacy, Elisabeth A. Keller Nov 2011

Consensual Amorous Relationships Between Faculty And Students: The Constitutional Right To Privacy, Elisabeth A. Keller

Elisabeth Keller

Surveys of college students in the United States revealed that a significant number of students thought they had been victims of some form of sexual harassment. Growing awareness of the magnitude, dimensions, and effects of sexual harassment at educational institutions and the potential for institutional liability have prompted educators to adopt policies to avert such problems. The policies typically prohibit sexual harassment of employees and students and alert the university community to the serious effects of sexual harassment and the potential for student exploitation. Some universities have gone beyond establishing regulations directed at widely litigated problems of sexual harassment and …


Hidden In Plain Sight: Achieving More Just Results In Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Cases By Re-Examining Supreme Court Precedent, Elisabeth A. Keller, Judith B. Tracy Nov 2011

Hidden In Plain Sight: Achieving More Just Results In Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Cases By Re-Examining Supreme Court Precedent, Elisabeth A. Keller, Judith B. Tracy

Elisabeth Keller

Lower federal courts often fail to provide plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases the relief intended by Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 and mandated by the Supreme Court when it recognized the cause of action twenty years ago. There is little doubt that sexual harassment in the workplace persists. However, lower courts misapply or ignore Supreme Court reasoning that would result in fairer and more consistent dispositions in hostile work environment sexual harassment cases. This article draws directly on reasoning from the Supreme Court cases to explain the sources of the confusion in the lower courts and offers …


Hidden In Plain Sight: Achieving More Just Results In Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Cases By Re-Examining Supreme Court Precedent, Elisabeth A. Keller, Judith B. Tracy Nov 2011

Hidden In Plain Sight: Achieving More Just Results In Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment Cases By Re-Examining Supreme Court Precedent, Elisabeth A. Keller, Judith B. Tracy

Elisabeth Keller

Lower federal courts often fail to provide plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases the relief intended by Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 and mandated by the Supreme Court when it recognized the cause of action twenty years ago. There is little doubt that sexual harassment in the workplace persists. However, lower courts misapply or ignore Supreme Court reasoning that would result in fairer and more consistent dispositions in hostile work environment sexual harassment cases. This article draws directly on reasoning from the Supreme Court cases to explain the sources of the confusion in the lower courts and offers …


Legal Lines In Shifting Sand: Immigration Law And Human Rights In The Wake Of September 11, Daniel Kanstroom Nov 2011

Legal Lines In Shifting Sand: Immigration Law And Human Rights In The Wake Of September 11, Daniel Kanstroom

Daniel Kanstroom

In March of 2004, a group of legal scholars gathered at Boston College Law School to examine the doctrinal implications of the events of September 11, 2001. They reconsidered the lines drawn between citizens and noncitizens, war and peace, the civil and criminal systems, as well as the U.S. territorial line. Participants responded to the proposition that certain entrenched historical matrices no longer adequately answer the complex questions raised in the “war on terror.” They examined the importance of government disclosure and the public’s right to know; the deportation system’s habeas corpus practices; racial profiling; the convergence of immigration and …


Harvesting New Conceptions Of Equality: Opportunity, Results, And Neutrality, Cedric M. Powell Oct 2011

Harvesting New Conceptions Of Equality: Opportunity, Results, And Neutrality, Cedric M. Powell

Cedric M. Powell

This is a critical period in the Court’s history; there is a doctrinal shift from the Rehnquist Court’s colorblind constitutionalism to the Roberts Court’s post-racial universalism. The Fourteenth Amendment and Title VII have been inverted: under the Fourteenth Amendment, whites are the new discrete and insular minority to be protected from a result-oriented “racial” process; and, under Title VII, disparate impact is irrelevant in the absence of a “strong basis in evidence” to believe that there will be liability. In a very direct way, the Court’s race jurisprudence privileges reverse discrimination suits. To advance the critique of the Court’s doctrinal …


Last Hired, First Fired Layoffs And Title Vii, James S. Rogers Oct 2011

Last Hired, First Fired Layoffs And Title Vii, James S. Rogers

James S. Rogers

No abstract provided.


Justice, The Bretton Woods Institutions And The Problem Of Inequality, Frank J. Garcia Oct 2011

Justice, The Bretton Woods Institutions And The Problem Of Inequality, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

The Bretton Woods Institutions are, together with the WTO, the preeminent international institutions devoted to managing international economic relations. This mandate puts them squarely in the center of the debate concerning development, inequality and global justice. While the normative analysis of the WTO is gaining momentum, the systematic normative evaluation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is comparatively less developed. This essay aims to contribute to that nascent inquiry. How might global justice criteria apply to the ideology and operations of the Bank and Fund? Political theory offers an abundance of perspectives from which to conduct such …


Trade Justice And Security, Frank J. Garcia Oct 2011

Trade Justice And Security, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

[Refers to Revised Draft, December 9, 2005] The social psychology literature on justice suggests that the perception of injustice produces the strongest human emotional response. Perceptions of injustice can lead to conflicts over the justice of social outcomes, threatening social cohesion and security. Trade law, and globalization more generally, are increasingly perceived as unjust with respect to the interests of developing countries and of the poor in all countries. To the extent that the various stakeholders in globalization perceive a lack of reciprocity between their investment and their return, they will naturally address their claims of injustice towards the global …


How Myth-Busting About The Historical Goals Of Civil Rights Activism Can Illuminate Paths For The Future, Susan D. Carle Sep 2011

How Myth-Busting About The Historical Goals Of Civil Rights Activism Can Illuminate Paths For The Future, Susan D. Carle

Susan D. Carle

  • This article considers four myths about the history of civil rights activism, taht have tended to cloud assessments about current current civil rights law and its potential future directions. I argue that correcting those myths can help illunundile promising paths for the future. In each instance, alternative historical narrative routes for further development of core principles of civil rights law, including further theoretical and practical work to pursue long-standing concepts of structural discrimination, the promise of experimentalist approaches to regulation and enforcement, increased interdisciplinary colaboration between law and other social science fields, and more focus on matters of economic inequality …


The New Gender Essentialism, Kimberly A. Yuracko Aug 2011

The New Gender Essentialism, Kimberly A. Yuracko

Kimberly Yuracko

In the 19th and early 20th Century women were often excluded from jobs and opportunities because of their sex. Sex, it was thought, defined individuals’ abilities and interests in ways that rendered women fit for certain tasks and unfit for many others. Fortunately, such sexual essentialism has been repudiated by courts. No longer, for example, may employers make assumptions about how women must or should behave because of their sex. Nonetheless, I contend that the sexual essentialism of the past is being replaced by a new form of gender essentialism whereby courts not only permit but in fact enforce dichotomous …


Outsiders Inside The Beltway: Latcrit Xiv - Critical Outsider Theory And Praxis In The Policymaking Of The New American Regime, Anthony E. Varona Aug 2011

Outsiders Inside The Beltway: Latcrit Xiv - Critical Outsider Theory And Praxis In The Policymaking Of The New American Regime, Anthony E. Varona

Anthony E. Varona

A substantive foreword to the symposium book for the Fourteenth Annual Latino/Latina Critical Legal Theory Scholarship Conference hosted by the American University Washington College of Law. The foreword includes information about the conference theme, its planning and execution, and includes excerpts from the presentations of a number of prominent plenary and keynote speakers, including Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-CA), Caroline Fredrickson (the executive director of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy), Robert Raben (the president of the Raben Group), Jarrett Barrios (the president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), Prof. Jenny Rivera (professor of law and director …


Teaching Social Justice Lawyering: Systematically Including Community Legal Education In Clinical Legal Education, Margaret Johnson, Catherine Klein, Margaret Barry, Lisa Martin, A. Camp Aug 2011

Teaching Social Justice Lawyering: Systematically Including Community Legal Education In Clinical Legal Education, Margaret Johnson, Catherine Klein, Margaret Barry, Lisa Martin, A. Camp

Margaret E Johnson

There is a body of literature on clinical legal theory that urges a focus in clinics beyond the single client to an explicit teaching of social justice lawyering. This Article adds to this emerging body of work by discussing the valuable role community legal education plays as a vehicle for teaching skills and values essential to single client representation and social justice lawyering. The Article examines the theoretical underpinnings of clinical legal education, community organizing and community education and how they influenced the authors’ design and implementation of community legal education within their clinics. It then discusses two projects designed …


The Meaning Of The Seventeenth Amendment And A Century Of State Defiance, Zachary D. Clopton, Steven E. Art Aug 2011

The Meaning Of The Seventeenth Amendment And A Century Of State Defiance, Zachary D. Clopton, Steven E. Art

Zachary D Clopton

Nearly a century ago, the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution worked a substantial change in American government, dictating that the people should elect their Senators by popular vote. Despite its significance, no court or commentator has explained what the Amendment means or how it works. This Article fills that void, providing the first definitive interpretation of the Seventeenth Amendment. Our account is based on a detailed textual analysis and a variety of other sources: historical and textual antecedents; relevant Supreme Court decisions; the complete debates in Congress; and the social and political factors that led to this new constitutional …


Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens Aug 2011

Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens

Lanessa L. owens

Committing Crimes One Bill At Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World.

From Masters’ and Slaves’, to Gays’ and Straights’, you think they are different; I will convince you they are the same. I will demonstrate how legislatures have historically and continually abused their power to enact laws. Under the disguise of some governmental interest, legislatures continue to create, enact, and enforce bias laws. This article imports Criminal Procedure into Constitutional Law to create a proactive solution to the ongoing problem of law making. It is this author contention that the …


Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens Aug 2011

Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens

Lanessa L. owens

Committing Crimes One Bill At Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World. From Masters’ and Slaves’, to Gays’ and Straights’, you think they are different; I will convince you they are the same. I will demonstrate how legislatures have historically and continually abused their power to enact laws. Under the disguise of some governmental interest, legislatures continue to create, enact, and enforce bias laws. This article imports Criminal Procedure into Constitutional Law to create a proactive solution to the ongoing problem of law making. It is this author contention that the …


Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens Aug 2011

Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens

Lanessa L. owens

Committing Crimes One Bill At Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World. From Masters’ and Slaves’, to Gays’ and Straights’, you think they are different; I will convince you they are the same. I will demonstrate how legislatures have historically and continually abused their power to enact laws. Under the disguise of some governmental interest, legislatures continue to create, enact, and enforce bias laws. This article imports Criminal Procedure into Constitutional Law to create a proactive solution to the ongoing problem of law making. It is this author contention that the …


Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens Aug 2011

Committing Crimes One Bill At A Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World, Lanessa Owens

Lanessa L. owens

Committing Crimes One Bill At Time; From The White House To The Jail House, Enacting Rational Laws In An Irrational World. From Masters’ and Slaves’, to Gays’ and Straights’, you think they are different; I will convince you they are the same. I will demonstrate how legislatures have historically and continually abused their power to enact laws. Under the disguise of some governmental interest, legislatures continue to create, enact, and enforce bias laws. This article imports Criminal Procedure into Constitutional Law to create a proactive solution to the ongoing problem of law making. It is this author contention that the …


Segregated Poverty And The Constitutional Right To Equal Access To Middle Income Peers, Derek W. Black Aug 2011

Segregated Poverty And The Constitutional Right To Equal Access To Middle Income Peers, Derek W. Black

Derek W. Black

Concentrated poverty in public schools continues to be a leading determinate of the educational opportunities that minority students receive. Since the effective end of mandatory desegregation, advocates have lacked legal tools to address it. As an alternative, some advocates and scholars have attempted to incorporate the concerns of concentrated poverty and racial segregation into educational litigation under state constitutions, but these efforts have not taken hold. Thus, all that has remained for students in poor and minority schools is the hope that school finance litigation could direct sufficient resources to mitigate their plight. This Article offers a better solution. Rather …


Individual Mandates: A Founder-Approved Means Under The Necessary And Proper Clause, Eli Alcaraz Jul 2011

Individual Mandates: A Founder-Approved Means Under The Necessary And Proper Clause, Eli Alcaraz

Eli A Alcaraz

The Affordable Health Care Act’s (“ACA”) individual mandate requiring most Americans to purchase healthcare was challenged as unconstitutional even before the ACA was passed. Challengers to the ACA assert that the federal government has never been allowed to force an individual to make a purchase from a private entity and that the ACA’s requirement that an individual do so is unconstitutional. This Comment takes issue with those asserting that an “individual mandate” is a contemporary invention and unconstitutional. As a matter of fact, there is at least one historical example where the federal government has forced individuals to makes purchases …


Cognitive Illiberalism And Debiasing Strategies, Paul Secunda Jul 2011

Cognitive Illiberalism And Debiasing Strategies, Paul Secunda

Paul M. Secunda

Legal realist scholars of a generation ago posited that judicial perception of facts reflect previously-held values and assumptions rather than record evidence. Yet crucially those scholars did not describe the psychological mechanism by which judges’ values come to shape facts. Understanding the psychological mechanism, culturally-motivated cognition, is a necessary first step to counteract the impact of cognitive illiberalism. Cognitive illiberalism results from the manner in which legal decisionmakers explain their decisions, and how those explanations are processed by “losers” in the politico-legal wars of our society. The phenomenon of cognitive illiberalism delegitimizes legal decisions and causes societal discontent with the …


Sacrificing Massiah: Confusion Over Exlusion And Erosion Of The Right To Counsel, James J. Tomkovicz Jul 2011

Sacrificing Massiah: Confusion Over Exlusion And Erosion Of The Right To Counsel, James J. Tomkovicz

james j tomkovicz

ABSTRACT: “Sacrificing Massiah: Confusion Over Exclusion and Erosion of the Right to Counsel” - James J. Tomkovicz “Sacrificing Massiah” examines the legitimacy and impacts of Kansas v. Ventris’s explanation of the Massiah “exclusionary rule.” It first traces the cryptic development of Massiah’s right to counsel-based suppression doctrine through a series of post-Massiah opinions. It then discusses Ventris—the first definitive explanation of the justifications for barring admissions deliberately elicited from uncounseled defendants. The Ventris Court classified Massiah suppression as a mere deterrent safeguard designed to prevent pretrial counsel deprivations and denied that defendants have the personal right not to be convicted …


Admissibility Of Investigatory Reports In § 1983 Civil Rights Actions - A User's Manual, Martin A. Schwartz Jun 2011

Admissibility Of Investigatory Reports In § 1983 Civil Rights Actions - A User's Manual, Martin A. Schwartz

Martin A. Schwartz

No abstract provided.


Addendum: Civil Rights In Jeopardy, Martin A. Schwartz, Eileen Kaufman Jun 2011

Addendum: Civil Rights In Jeopardy, Martin A. Schwartz, Eileen Kaufman

Martin A. Schwartz

No abstract provided.


Face-Recognition Surveillance: A Moment Of Truth For Fourth Amendment Rights In Public Places, Douglas Fretty May 2011

Face-Recognition Surveillance: A Moment Of Truth For Fourth Amendment Rights In Public Places, Douglas Fretty

Douglas A Fretty

Americans are increasingly monitored with face-recognition technology (FRT), a surveillance tool that allows the state to identify a pedestrian based on a pre-existing database of facial photographs. This Article argues that FRT embodies the fundamental Fourth Amendment dilemmas raised by contemporary digital surveillance and will serve as harbinger for the Amendment’s future. FRT cases will test whether people retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in their identities when they move in public, and whether the aggregation of information about a person’s movements amounts to an unreasonable search. Further, the suspicionless identification of pedestrians will test whether a seizure can occur …


The Niqab In The Courtroom: Protecting Free Exercise Of Religion In A Post-Smith World, Adam Schwartzbaum Apr 2011

The Niqab In The Courtroom: Protecting Free Exercise Of Religion In A Post-Smith World, Adam Schwartzbaum

Adam Schwartzbaum

The niqab has become enmeshed in heated political controversy all across the world. In the United States, the situation of Ginnah Muhammad exemplifies the complex legal issues arising from conflicts between individuals whose religious beliefs compel this practice and the secular state. Muhammad, an African-American Muslim woman, was ejected from a Michigan small claims court for refusing to remove her veil while testifying. This Comment explores the constitutionality of this action, and a subsequent amendment to the Michigan Rules of Evidence passed in response to her case giving judges the power to “exercise reasonable control over parties and witnesses." Inevitably, …


Fatal Backlash: Advocating The Right To Die In America, Gehan D. Gunatilleke Mr. Apr 2011

Fatal Backlash: Advocating The Right To Die In America, Gehan D. Gunatilleke Mr.

Gehan D Gunatilleke Mr.

The emerging issue of an individual’s right to physician-assisted suicide presents a fascinating ethical, clinical and legal challenge. The normative distinction between physician-assisted suicide and other manifestations of the right to die is virtually negligible, since the traditional dichotomies relating to the ‘active’ and the ‘passive’, ‘acts’ and ‘omissions’, and ‘intention’ and ‘knowledge’, are unpersuasive in the context of prohibiting physician-assisted suicide alone. This paper critically analyzes American discourse on physician-assisted suicide both in the public policy and constitutional law spheres and concludes that the real opposition to the practice derives from the moral preferences of society. Given the actual …


Representing Byron De La Beckwith In Film And Journalism: Popular Memories Of Mississippi And The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl Apr 2011

Representing Byron De La Beckwith In Film And Journalism: Popular Memories Of Mississippi And The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

On June 12 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was shot to death in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Nine days later, police arrested avowed white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith for Evers's murder.


Mississippi’S Social Transformation In Public Memories Of The Trial Against Byron De La Beckwith For The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl Apr 2011

Mississippi’S Social Transformation In Public Memories Of The Trial Against Byron De La Beckwith For The Murder Of Medgar Evers, Kristen Hoerl

Kristen Hoerl

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted for the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Journalism coverage of the trial and the 1996 docudrama Ghosts of Mississippi crafted a social values transformation myth that depicted Beckwith as the primary villain of civil rights past and cast his conviction as a sign that racism had been cleansed from Mississippi. Popular media naturalized this myth intertextually though narrative repetition and through symbolic cues that established the film as a source of historic understanding. These cues deflected critical attention from contemporary social conditions that have maintained racial inequity and continue …


Regulating The Marketplaces Of Political And Economic Ideas, Christopher S. Ford Mar 2011

Regulating The Marketplaces Of Political And Economic Ideas, Christopher S. Ford

Christopher S Ford

Ever since Justice Holmes’ famous dissent in Abrams v. United States, First Amendment jurisprudence has labored under the metaphor of a ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The government must abstain from regulating this market, courts and commentators have argued, to best ensure healthy and free competition among ideas. The Supreme Court has frequently relied on this metaphor when evaluating claims under the First Amendment, and did so prominently when deciding the recent case of Citizens United v. F.E.C. Yet the sweeping majority opinion by Justice Kennedy and strident dissent by Justice Stevens advance two fundamentally different ideas of how the marketplace of …